very different conditions that exist in colonial societies (see Ballantyne 2007). It is, however, noteworthy, McDonald comments, that nowhere in Coetzee’s course description does he refer to any of the significant studies then beginning to define what scholars now generally refer to as Book History, or History (or Histories) of the Book (I will henceforth refer to “book history” without the canonising capitals), although most would recognise similarities between Coetzee’s aims and this interdisciplinary field. Although the module was not offered in the following year (McDonald suggests that this had to do with the conservative literary critical ethos in UCT’s English Department and with the relative risk final-year undergraduate students, used to more traditional course models, would likely have ascribed to Coetzee’s), it is clear that Coetzee was at least an early fellow traveller with a field whose challenges have encouraged a great deal of historical and literary scholarship in the last 30 years (see McDonald 2012, 800–3). For the purposes of emphasising not only the contributions to knowledge made by the chapters in this volume, but also their provocations—and their methodological usefulness—for studies of colonial and post-colonial cultures of script, print and the book more generally, I will linger momentarily on the contours of this field, which has only recently come overtly to affect scholarship about print and text studies in and of South and Southern Africa.
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One of the early leading thinkers in the emerging field of book history—one of those not cited by Coetzee—was French social historian Roger Chartier. In his essay “Laborers and voyagers: From the text to the reader” (1992), Chartier manages to state plainly some of the key tenets animating this relatively new scholarly endeavour. Quoting Michel de Certeau’s claim in The Practice of Everyday Life that texts only have meaning through readers and that they change as readers bring new expectations and modes of reading to the text, he argues as follows:
Readers, in fact, never confront abstract, idealized texts detached from any materiality. They hold in their hands or perceive objects and forms whose structures and modalities govern their reading or hearing, and consequently the possible comprehension of the text read or heard (Chartier 1992, 50).
A text can therefore never be approached purely as only a semantic field (the view that had, Chartier notes caustically, hitherto dominated “not only structuralist criticism in all its variants but also literary theories concerned with reconstructing the modes of reception of works”); rather, “it is necessary to maintain that forms produce meaning, and that even a fixed text is invested with new meaning and being … when the physical form through which it is presented for interpretation changes” (Chartier 1992, 50–51). “The task of the historian”, he argues, ought accordingly to be “to reconstruct the variations that differentiate the ‘readable space’ (the texts in their material and discursive forms) and those which govern the circumstances of their ‘actualization’ (the readings seen as concrete practices and interpretive procedures)” (Chartier 1992, 50). “Authors do not write books”, Chartier (1992, 53) suggests usefully, “they write texts which become objects copied, handwritten, etched, printed, and today computerized.”
Robert Darnton, one of the earliest proponents of book history in North America (although himself primarily a scholar of ancien régime and Enlightenment French print and book histories), concurs with Chartier: “typography as well as style and syntax determine the ways in which texts convey meanings”; any “history of reading” should “take account of the ways that texts constrain readers as well as the ways that readers take liberties with texts” (Darnton 2002, 21; see also Darnton 1990). The suggestion is that historians—indeed, students of culture generally—ought to consider as their proper remit “the text itself, the object that conveys the text, and the act that grasps it” (Chartier 1989, 161). They—we—need to ascertain and describe the material form of any text that readers have encountered, to ask how readers encountered it and what they did with it, and to be alert to how this might have changed from one community (and text) to the next (and the next instantiation of a text) over time. It is in the “gap” between idealised text and materiality, Chartier (1992, 53) insists, that “meaning is constructed”.
Some Anglo-American literary critics who were also textual scholars had in fact been making similar suggestions in the late 1970s and the 1980s. With reference to his own work on Romantic and Victorian poets, for example, Jerome McGann argued that scholars ought to consider not only a literary work’s historical contexts, but also the history of what he called its “textualizations” (McGann 1985, 10; cf. McGann 1991, 9). How, scholars like McGann asked, does the text of a canonical nineteenth-century English poem or novel that is studied by university undergraduates in a scholarly edition differ from the text of the novel encountered by its first readers? To the bibliographer and scholarly editor’s question “how is this text different from this one?”, critics attuned to what was coming to be known as book history added such questions as “how has each instance of publication changed the text and affected the meaning?” Also: how has this text—with or without variation—been rendered a different work by virtue of textual variations, but also through changing format, typography, and different co- or paratexts: those “fringes” or margins of text, images, or other apparatus (cover, blurbs, dedications, glossaries and so on) that constitute, Gérard Genette (1997, 2) argues, “a zone not only of transition but also of transaction”?
Chartier and others in the early wave of influential book historians drew on the methodology of the French Annales school of socio-economic history. A seminal engagement of this school with the history of print came with Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin’s 1958 L’apparition du livre, translated as The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450–1800 (1976). The field gained its own scholarly journal, the Revue française d’histoire du livre (new series, 1971), and it is worth noting that English has tended to use the form of the direct translation of the French (“history” and “book” both in the singular).2 As Robert Darnton (2002, 10), who did so much to bring together Anglo-American and French bibliographic and historiographic traditions, explains, what these Annales-influenced scholars did was to attempt to “uncover the general pattern of book production and consumption over long stretches of time” rather than to offer detailed bibliographic analysis.
A key call to constitute a break from traditional analytical and descriptive bibliography that had long been a sub-field of literary and historical studies came from an Oxford professor of bibliography and textual criticism, New Zealand scholar Don (D. F.) McKenzie, whose 1985 Panizzi Lectures at the British Library came at a seminal moment in the evolution of book history and helped to constitute the field for a growing number of scholars in the later 1980s. McKenzie (1986, 10) argued that bibliography could not and should not “exclude from its own proper concerns the relation between form, function and symbolic meaning”. As hitherto undertaken in Britain and the United States in particular, bibliography had often merely described the effects of the “technical … processes of transmission”, he contended, but it should hitherto also consider the relationship between these and the “social” processes involved (McKenzie 1986, 13). McKenzie memorably showed the ramifications of this kind of analysis in a detailed account of misreadings of Congreve, including, ironically, in Wimsatt and Beardsley’s influential essay “The intentional fallacy”, which had argued (among other things) that the literary scholar should focus on the text itself (and only on the text). Congreve’s text had become corrupted, McKenzie showed, and changes in the literal appearance of text—of each word’s relative position in the typographical layout of words on the page in successive editions, excerpts and quotations—had a direct bearing on meaning, something that Wimsatt and Beardsley, for all their attention to the “text”, had missed. Variations bore on “the most obvious concerns of textual criticism—getting the right words in the right order”, McKenzie argued; variations suggested the importance of paying attention to “the semiotics of print” (including “the role of typography in forming meaning”) and, crucially, reflected significantly “on the critical theories of authorial intention and reader response” (McKenzie 1986, 21). The important point for McKenzie was to notice how an expanded set of skills, concerns and questions
